Month: December 2014

These are the 1984 Endy Awards, wherein I pretend to give out maneki-neko statues to the best in that year in film. This is also a tie-in with our 1984 Year in Review episode of The George Sanders Show. Awards for many other years can be found in the Endy Awards Index. Eligibility is determined by imdb date and by whether or not I’ve seen the movie in question. Nominees are listed in alphabetical order and the winners are bolded. And the Endy goes to. . .

An annual tradition here at The End, is a look at my favorite film discoveries of the year, any movie more than a few years old that I saw for the first time in 2014. Previous years include: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006. I watched 410 or so movies in 2014, roughly half of which qualify for this list. Here are 185 that I liked.

As I did last year, I’m making a Best of the Year list following the conventional system for what counts as a 2014 film, mainly the nonsensical and ahistorical system that decrees that critics may only consider movies to have existed once they have played for a week in a commercial venue in New York City. (This is the system that claims my favorite film of 2013 (La última película), which played for a week in Seattle in 2014, can only be considered a 2015 film because that is when it will finally get a New York release, probably). But alas, we all must bow to convention, however silly, every once in awhile.

My official 2014 list will come in a few months, right around Oscar-time, along with the 2014 Endy Awards and a special episode of The George Sanders Show. By that time I will have been able to see a number of my most-anticipated 2014 movies that haven’t yet been released here, including Inherent Vice, Selma and The Taking of Tiger Mountain Into the Woods (Tiger Mountain, which opens on December 24th in China, doesn’t open until January 2nd in New York, which means it’s a 2015 film by the New York standard. Thanks to Jaime Grijalba for the correction). Coming this weekare our annual year-in-review episode of They ShotPictures, as well as a look at the best films of 1984 on The George Sanders Show.

I think I “related” to parts of Robert Greene’s non-fiction film in the way so many other people “related” to Boyhood, in that when we join her, stay-at-home mom Brandy Burre is very much looking to reestablish an identity for herself outside the home. This manifests itself as one of the main threads of the film’s story: her preparing to restart her acting career after a several years’ hiatus. That need for a creative outlet, for a definition of self that doesn’t revolve around one’s children (and the guilt inherit in that, a little voice telling you that not devoting yourself 100% to your children makes you a bad parent) is something I imagine every parent experiences, especially for those of us who abandon our careers for full-time parenthood. But also, more obliquely and alien to my own experience, this identity shift for Ms. Burre manifests itself in the collapse of her relationship with her partner Tim. This ultimately becomes the dominant storyline of the film: while Burre looks for jobs and gets her hair done and meets with friends, nothing really happens on the job front, but the relationship story unfolds dramatically in time as Tim gradually moves out of the house and we learn ever so little about what actually happened to break them up (both the proximate events and the emotions that underlied it).

But how much of what we see is actually true? Early in the film, during a standard documentary-style “confessional”, Burre says a line and then repeats it, with a different emphasis, as if in another take of a staged scene. This, along with her profession as an Actress, clues us in to be wary of the “actuality” of what we see, at odds with the documentary-style of the film (hand-held camera, live (in one instance rudely interrupted) sound, natural lighting). Some shots are clearly staged, notably a slow motion one of Burre washing dishes in a 1950s style red dress, an image referenced in the film’s poster (and echoed in the old movie posters that line Burre’s home, which are pointedly revealed to not belong to her). Other shots are very “movie” shots: ice breaking up on the Hudson River, a cut to an abstract orange and pale blue of a sunset during one of Burre’s interviews, a shot of her walking along an overpass, briefly recalling Millennium Mambo (a film with which it would make a great double feature) in its sheer movie-star gorgeousness. Half the film looks like “reality”, the other half like “cinema”.

Doubling down on the ontological riddle is the fact that Burre’s conflict is identity-based: she finds herself playing a role (housewife) which is unsatisfying to her. Throughout the film she will adopt a series of other “roles”: singer, yoga instructor, party hostess, wife, daughter, unfaithful spouse, “other” woman, abuse victim, none of which fully encapsulate who she truly is (and some of which are explained away as mistaken identities, as when her facial bruises are explained to be the result of a simple fall but which people assume are domestic violence. At least that’s what she tells us.) In the same way Burre can’t find a single role that defines “her” (though for the outside world “that woman who was on The Wire” seems to apply), we are left knowing that we are unable to understand her or her life.

An actor is a relatablity machine. They are the medium through which we experience scenarios, stories, worlds, lives, roles that are (usually but not always) unavailable to us in our everyday lives. Everything an actor does is a lie, and yet, if done in a certain way, the emotions they inspire seem real. Actress is not so much an investigation into Simulation as The Real (or Hyper-Real), as a riff on the unreliability of our understanding of the relationship between cinema and reality. Like a puzzle box with pieces missing, it asks more questions than it answers. It’s a documentary about a woman who is an actress and who may be acting for all or part of the time we see her on-screen. Does it make a difference if the story of her breakup is real or staged? Does it make a difference if her to-the-camera expressions of her emotions are real or performed? Is it possible for the camera to capture the core of a person? Can anybody every really know anyone?

This, I think, is how Actress escapes Boyhood‘s relatability problem (which, it should be said is more a matter of that film’s reception than anything inherent in the film itself). To the extent that much of the critical response to Richard Linklater’s film seemed to rest on the fact that viewers’ saw reflected on-screen their own life experiences, it worked as a kind of self-reinforcement, a form of flattery. I don’t feel affirmed by Burre’s identity crisis, but to the extent that she expresses on-screen a conflict I’ve felt in my own life, I feel complicit in it. By undermining a layer of verisimilitude, Greene encourages not identification but questioning, both of the film’s storyline and of our own relationship to the roles we play. We’re asked to both be emotionally moved by the character while at the same time acknowledging that she is an Actress and that what we are seeing is potentially fake (and just as potentially real). I’ve experienced some of what Burre expresses, but not all of it, do I relate to those things in the same way, do they have the same emotional impact on me? Boyhood tells a story that for many reflects certain aspects of their self, which is fine and good and many films, Actress among them, do the same thing. But Actress pushes further, challenging our understanding of what the self is, asking why we want to see ourselves in performances, as performers.

What I really want to know is: can I nominate Burre for a Best Actress award this year, or not?

These are the 1999 Endy Awards, wherein I pretend to give out maneki-neko statues to the best in that year in film. Awards for many other years can be found in the Endy Awards Index. Eligibility is determined by imdb date and by whether or not I’ve seen the movie in question. Nominees are listed in alphabetical order and the winners are bolded. And the Endy goes to. . .Best Picture:

Levant will win again in 2012 for Holy Motors. Just missing out on nominations are Andy Lau for Running Out of Time, Eddie Murphy for Bowfinger, Russell Crowe for The Insider and Matthew Broderick for Election.

I think this is the first year in which I like the nominees for Adapted Screenplay as whole more than the Original Screenplays. In the 21st Century, Adapted is kind of a wasteland, but all five of these are terrific.

Running Out of Karma is my on-going series on Johnnie To, Hong Kong and Chinese-language cinema. Here is an index.

Pang Ho-cheung’s ambitious family melodrama chronicles the intersecting lives of an all-star cast, at times grasping towards Magnolia and Yi yi but ultimately settling at an ending so unsatisfying one hopes it’s meant satirically. Which, knowing Pang, it very well might be. It’s an inverted cousin to Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After. Where Chan’s characters are haunted by an unknowable, unexplainable future, lost on the edge of an apocalypse, Pang’s are haunted by the past, manifesting itself in increasingly obvious and over-explained metaphors (a bomb shelter, an actual unearthed bombshell, a beached whale) and speeches. Chan’s film is rough, with jagged cuts and unpredictable shifts in tone and style, smashing comedy, horrific violence, and eerie ghostliness together in an unwieldy expression of anxiety. But Pang’s camera glides through a sleekly modern Hong Kong, gorgeous images of light and color connecting the various characters to their city and to each other with a flowing seamlessness. It’s airlessly beautiful, Hong Kong as iPhone packaging.

The story of a father (Ng Man-tat) a Taoist priest in an absurd toupee, and his two children. Miriam Yeung is married to Eric Tsang. She’s convinced her dead mother never loved her, manifested as a returned-to-sender package of the paper she had burnt for her mother after her death (a Chinese tradition is the burning of paper money for the dead to use in the afterlife. Various Chinese rituals and traditions will be contrasted throughout the film with the ultra-modern environments of contemporary Hong Kong). Her husband, Tsang, is a doctor who is sleeping with his nurse. Yeung’s brother is Louis Koo, a motivational speaker who is married to Gigi Leung, an aging model and actress. Koo is convinced his daughter isn’t pretty enough, while Leung tries to navigate her unseemly professional world, where the line between actress/model and prostitute is increasingly thin. Interspersed throughout are marvelous dream sequences: a scale model of Hong Kong, used as pillow shots early in the film, becomes the literal stomping ground of the child’s pet lizard; Yeung one night finds herself in a Hong Kong made of paper, beckoned by a ringtone of the theme song to Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette”) on a two-dimensional taxi ride.

In the end, everything comes together in a way that implies resolution: the family finally eats together (at a McDonald’s!), the music rises, people look happily at each other and the bright dawn of a new day. But weirdly, nothing is actually resolved in anything like a satisfactory manner. Miriam and Gigi give speeches (Gigi’s only to herself), Eric doesn’t change a thing and Louis decides that it’s OK if his daughter is ugly because she can always get plastic surgery. What? Is this simply Pang being dumb, misogynistic and/or sloppy? Trying to cover-up the deficiencies in his own screenplay with virtuosic displays of glossiness? Or is it a satire that lies so far beneath the surface as to become almost invisible? These terrible men don’t learn a thing and don’t change a bit. The women are slightly better off: at least Miriam is. Gigi might be even worse off than when the film started. Early on she stands up defiantly to a producer who implies that her only way of getting a role is by sleeping with the boss. In the end, she’s relieved when her husband agrees that plastic surgery is awesome so she doesn’t have to tell him about her own past beauty-enhancing medical interventions. She doesn’t confront the past that haunts her, it just kind of floats away.

The Midnight After has been for most of 2014 one of my favorite films of the year, its inexplicability and refusal to answer the questions it raises or explore the many facets and potentialities of its plot seems to me intentional and highly satisfying, an encapsulation of the limits of knowledge in a wildly entertaining genre film package. I don’t know if Aberdeen is good or not. In its over-determination and over-explanation, I find it more mysterious and incomplete a whole than Chan’s intentionally-fragmentary movie. Pang has made a movie that is stunningly, vibrantly, frustratingly dead.